This is not a new term — the earliest
reference I can find is from 1975, and it is
said to be older still — but it has until now
been a specialist one among some writers for
what mainstream linguists prefer to call the
Black English Vernacular or
African-American Vernacular English and has
not commonly been found in dictionaries. The
word is a rather infelicitous blend of Ebony,
a near-synonym for “Black”, and phonics,
“the science of sound or of spoken sounds”; it
is as much a political as a linguistic term. It
is used to emphasize the distinctive grammar and
vocabulary of African-American speech, which, it
is argued, derive at least in part from various
Niger-Congo African languages and are a relic of
slavery. Whether Ebonics
is a dialect of English, a creole or a separate
language is open to argument, though the first
of these is the received view. It has suddenly
hit the headlines world-wide as a result of the
decision by the Oakland School Board in
California in December 1996 to recognize Ebonics
as a separate linguistic entity whose speakers
need assistance in becoming fluent in standard
American English.

Ebonics is greatly
misunderstood, largely because
of how it gained global
attention during a racially
charged education controversy in
Oakland, California. On Dec. 18,
1996, the Oakland School Board
passed
a resolution declaring
Ebonics to be the language of
28,000 African-American students
within that school district. Few
people had ever heard of the
term Ebonics prior to the
passage of that resolution, to
say nothing of how it was
created or originally defined.

Dr. Robert Williams, an
African-American social
psychologist, coined the term
Ebonics in 1973. His goal was to
combine the words “ebony” with
“phonics” to refer to “black
sounds.”Williams and several
other African-American social
scientists had gathered that
year at a conference sponsored
by the National Institutes of
Health to discuss the
psychological development of
black children. Williams and his
associates had been displeased
with the term Black English
and began to ponder the
alternatives.

Williams recounted the
creation of Ebonics as follows:

We need to define what we
speak. We need to give a
clear definition to our
language. …We know that
ebony means black and that
phonics refers to speech
sounds or the science of
sounds. Thus, we are really
talking about the science of
black speech sounds or
language. (Williams, 1997a)

Although the preceding
statement offers an early, vague
conception of Ebonics, the term
was formally defined in 1975
when Williams published an
edited volume, Ebonics: The
True Language of Black Folks.
In it, he classified Ebonics as
the

…linguistic and
paralinguistic features
which on a concentric
continuum represent the
communicative competence of
the West African, Caribbean,
and United States slave
descendant of African
origin. (Williams, 1975)

Disclaimer:This Web-site is an Ebonics related
entertainment site. This site deals with positive information
regarding ebonics, but also shows the humorous side, too.
This site is not designed to be racist, but purely to help bring
awareness that ebonics is a language and black people continue to
create new words that are now included in mainstream dictionary's.
It's okay to laugh and also okay to learn!

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